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What if something that you carry around in your pocket every day could help treat diseases and disorders?
A phone could be the answer for some of the most common diseases experienced by people around the world, like diabetes, anxiety, and depression. Digital Therapeutics (often shortened to DTx) describes a combination of software, technology, and scientific evidence used to aid in the treatment of medical conditions. They can either act as a supplement to conventional medical approaches or can even act as a replacement! Digital therapeutics can be something as simple as an app, or can integrate an array of sensors to provide the software real-time information on your body. Other forms of digital therapeutics can incorporate virtual reality, wearables similar to a health watch, or games!
You might have used a step counter app, calorie counter, or mindfulness app. Digital therapeutics goes far beyond this, and can actually induce long-term behavioral change in its users. Digital therapeutics collects data over periods of time and analyzes it to see how best it can help its users. Advanced versions incorporate AI to better analyze data and suggest interventions.
Applications of Digital Therapeutics
Digital therapeutics are being explored in the areas of chronic pain and chronic disease management, substance use disorders, health and weight loss, and mental health.
One study explored the use of an app to manage chronic lower back pain. Pain management with drugs can be tricky as the body can get used to it, making it less effective. Dependencies can form as well, eventually leading to addiction. Alternative pain management is crucial in these situations. Only one person using the app out of 138,000 users experienced a negative outcome. This rate of negative outcomes is similar to those of physiotherapy and mindfulness.
A study examining a mindfulness app found that its users showed reduced stress and better mental function! This digital therapeutic intervention was low-cost, easily accessible, and functioned well in terms of its intended outcome.
Another aspect of chronic disease management that often goes ignored is how tiring it can be. Performing tedious actions like exercise you don’t enjoy, or a diet that doesn’t taste good to you, isn’t very rewarding. A goal like good health is distant and hard to obtain, and it can be hard to keep up with a regime to attain that goal. Only 69–75% of patients comply with doctors’ recommendations for type 2 diabetes. This means an intervention that uses human psychology, such as digital therapeutics, can help.
One study used digital therapeutics to offer patient education, personalized behavior and nutrition counseling, and digital coaching for patients living with type 2 diabetes. It enabled participants to lose weight. Average blood sugar decreased, showing an improvement in symptoms. It even enabled more than half of the participants to reduce dependence on diabetes medication.
The Science and Technology behind Digital Therapeutics
At the forefront of medical advancements, digital therapeutics is emerging as a revolutionary approach. Yet, it is rooted in the fundamental scientific principle of using existing knowledge of medicine and human physiology.
Digital therapeutics is primarily used to change the behavior of its users, so it’s no surprise that behavioral psychology is one of the key scientific principles it uses. It’s important to motivate users, encourage compliance with interventions suggested by the program, and foster the behavioral changes made. Digital therapeutics often use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to do this. In cognitive behavioral therapy, the links between thoughts, feelings, and actions are examined. These links can be used to enable positive actions and behavioral changes. Human psychology principles are also used, in the form of creative user interfaces and design. These approaches makes interventions easy and intuitive to use.
Data is also a cornerstone of digital therapeutics. Digital therapeutic platforms collect and analyze large datasets from their users. These datasets carry a ton of information, from general health parameters to how each user is responding to each treatment. Advanced analytics and data science are often incorporated with machine learning and artificial algorithms. These can even predict how specific patients will respond and use these predictions to come up with personalized treatments.
Finally, digital therapeutics is still a new and evolving field. That means we need to understand exactly how it’s affecting its users. Researchers use randomized control trials to establish the efficacy and safety of various digital therapeutics interventions.
Randomized control trials involve splitting the participants into two groups randomly: one group undergoes digital therapeutics treatment, and one group gets a placebo. The two groups are then compared to see whether the treatment actually has an effect.
Addressing Data Privacy and Ethical Concerns
It can be a little intimidating to think about incorporating technology into health in such a big way, but digital therapeutics places a heavy focus on ethics.
Informed prior consent is a pillar of digital therapeutics. This means that even before patients use it, they know exactly what kind of data is being collected, who it is being communicated with, and what it is being used for. The role of science and evidence in informing and driving these interventions is also a crucial defining aspect for the field. This evidence also needs to be shared and communicated amongst all the user groups. Perhaps most importantly, any digital therapeutics intervention needs to deliver on its promises. With all these principles, digital therapeutics may actually improve on conventional medicine in a number of aspects.
Getting medical treatment is hard! It can be stressful, intimidating, expensive, and hard to access. With innovations like digital therapy, we can not only provide patients with better care and alleviate their symptoms, but we can also make the process easier and less expensive. Would you feel comfortable using an app to manage your health, or even treat you?
Glossary
Digital therapeutics: The use of software and/or technology to treat or manage diseases and symptoms
Placebo: A substitute for a treatment, having no effect, to get an accurate idea of what the treatment does in comparison
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